Discovering the truth from the ‘haters’
It would be nice to meet people who don’t bring out these ‘inner conflicts’ in me, but I think that’s asking a bit much. If you live in a world where everything is ‘rosy’, it’s ‘nice’ but not a lot of growing seems to happen when life is blissful – growing seems to accelerate when you are faced with things that challenge you.
How weird is it that we don’t seem to think the same, that our instincts and beliefs affect us in different ways. I don’t know how we would learn and grow within ourselves if there weren’t all these daily transfers of different pieces of the puzzle and daily challenges with conflicting beliefs. I am constantly trying to see the connection, trying to put the pieces of life’s puzzle together.
I find it awkward when I meet someone that thinks they have all the answers.. it feels like a lie, the b.s. metre goes off again. How can they possibly think they know? We are constantly remodeling our belief systems on a moment-to-moment basis. I have adjusted and re-adjusted and continually modify and try and make sense out of what I learn.
When I connect with someone.. a podcast, a forum, a person/group on facebook, or any person in “real life”, I see us all as one, as reconnecting source, as transferring information… that I am “connecting” with / discovering you for a reason. I’m not sure of the reason, but I believe it is for this transfer of knowledge, to teach to or learn something from, that there is some reason for ‘one’ or ‘both’ of us to grow from this experience, an extra piece of the puzzle for one of our journeys.
Sometimes I learn a difficult lesson from making such connections, but those hard lessons actually help me grow too. I’m talking about the ones that bring out the worst in you – your inner judgements, these feelings inside us that bring up unloving thoughts. We all have anti “somethings” in us. The “unforgivables”. Those are the ones that are hardest to overcome & understand. Those are the things I work on most, forgiving the unforgiveable.
Why is this person in my path, what am I to learn? And should I even be questioning it.. as in, it’s in those times that I question whether there is truth or not to the ‘connecting for a reason’ thing, but now that I’m being more conscious about questioning it, I am able to stop the times where I became better in some way, or when they did.
Sometimes the hardest things for me to deal with are not the ones that you would expect. Are even small-scale in the grand scheme of things. Although I do have strong ‘why’ feelings about inhumane acts, cruelty, dishonesty, etc. those unforgivables should be more expected as things to deal with, but my biggest growth spurts and hardest challenges for myself, personally, are when I am faced with the ‘haters’. Hostility.
What I loved about my time in Bali is the biggest, most noticeable difference in our cultures. Bali is a place where the culture seems to ‘love first’ and ‘judge later’. As in, they tend to love and trust you first unless you give them a reason not to. Whereas I grew up in Australia, in particular, Ballarat, where people are more noticeably a ‘judge first’ and ‘love later’ culture. I definitely prefer a reality where we ‘love first’.
So I have an inner conflict here, about whether there is something in ‘me’ that I need to fix in order for that to happen – whether I have too many past ‘wounds’ that something in me still hasn’t forgiven or gotten over and that is why they keep showing up, or whether that’s just life – that there are nice people and nasty people everywhere and that there is not a lesson or connection at all. Or even that I am also the same, that even though I am full of love and hope for mankind, these internal judgements that I have, make “me” both the nice & the nasty at the same time. That maybe I’m not as “nice” as I think I am, and maybe they are not as “nasty” as I think they are.
This conflicting belief is necessary for me to delve deeper into because they both have differing solutions.. on the one hand, if I am 100% responsible for this reality, then the haters showing up is something that I can only heal by working on myself, and on the other hand, if its just that there are some crappy, nasty people that are going to keep showing up despite the work on do on myself, then I would need to accept that and try and keep them out of my life.
The first belief empowers me to use these interactions as self-development lessons, the second belief gives me permission to run away.
I do think that I ‘love first’, I see good in everyone now and can for the most part, accept that we are all at where we are at (it wasn’t always this way, and it’s still a work-in-progress that shows up every now & again), but I still have ‘judgements’ that I need to work through before I am able to live in a reality similar to the Balinese. I am very loving, compassionate, and very sensitive, and yet also go through stages of being very unsure of myself. I can be super confident, happy and content at times, and then when faced with an unexpected hostility, it can throw me off balance and sometimes has the power to disrupt my bliss, and take me down another notch. When it happens, the feeling is very strong.. a strong sense of sadness, worry, fear… and ‘defensiveness’. I’m getting better at ‘letting go’ and not taking it personally, and have noticed that when “I” take responsibility that I can also laugh about some of the interactions, and other times I can literally see noticeable changes in the haters’ attitudes, that I am no longer their ‘target’ for their hate.
The ‘people-pleasing’ problem that I had, the strong feelings above used to last for years. I’ve noticed now, that as I’ve worked on myself, the feeling is gone faster, but can still last for hours, and sometimes I can let it consume my dreams or waking thoughts for days at a time, ever-seeking the solution to it (not trying to make them ‘like’ me, which is what I used to waste time on.. but to make myself ‘let go’ of my need for them ‘not to be mean’.. my inability or lack of control to make “them” change to be nicer people.. which is not a very helpful, healthy or even realistic way of thinking).
Do I love more, or avoid? Do I make ‘them’ right in my head, or do I stick to my truth and still ‘wish them well’? Or do I look at what they say and try and figure out if they are just being haters, just having a bad experience in their own lives, or even whether there is some truth to what they are saying… something that I perhaps “don’t want to hear” that keeps coming up. That I am “wrong” somehow and need to listen to take on board something they are saying.
In other words.. I have conflicting ideas on how to resolve it..
- Is the world really my mirror? Am I really creating this nastiness somehow?
// and can I change ‘myself’ to remove this experience? or, - Am I attracting these people for my own or their own personal growth?
// that I’m going to keep attracting certain ones throughout life that either myself or they have to work through to ‘let go’ of past wounds or negative thinking/judgments, or, - Is there just some nasty people in the world.. and I just need to avoid them
// discard them from my life, not looking for any self-growth lesson.. to stop looking for any hidden meaning and just accept that there are just some people in the world that are nasty.. move on, nothing to see here, or - “Other” :)